The House Of The Dead Remake (Nintendo Switch)

I think most people checking out this review will be familiar with the original game, but if not House of the Dead was an on-rails arcade light gun shooter released in the late 90’s. Despite there being over a dozen sequels and spin off over the years, the much loved original only ever made it home via a port to the Sega Saturn.

The premise of the game is as simple and cliche as it get, a crazy doctor infects people with a virus to create his own army of zombies. You’re the special agent assigned the fun task of going to his mansion to pump round after round into them blowing off appendages in every direction to save the day.

There are only 4 levels in the game, each set in a different location with their own end of level boss, and a single play thought will probably only take you around 30 minutes, but with all various paths thought the game and multiple endings, there is a lot of reply value. Especially when taking into account the local multi player and online high score leader boards.

As the name indicates The House of the Dead Remake, is in fact totally built from the ground up with an updated graphical look and sound. The most obvious different here are the controls. There is no easy way to play light gun games on a modern system in an authentic way thanks to the latency introduced with modern TV’s. House of the Dead remake does its best to offer a variety of ways to play allowing the user to find their most preferred method.

Surprisingly the default control scheme is using the analogue stick to move a cross hair around the screen. This was a fairly competent way to play the game, but for me felt completely lifeless.

Next I switched on the motion controls which work on both the Joycons and Switch Pro controller. It then became instantly clear why the developer chose to default the game to the previous control scheme. Although playing with motion controls was instantly more fun, it was also wildly inaccurate with the main issue being the constant gyro-drift. This can be corrected with the click of the thumb stick, but even so, trying to shoot a zombie without hitting a hostage was near impossible for me with any constancy.

The last, and by far the best option for my preference was a combination of both gyro and thumb stick controls. I was primarily using the thumb sticks to move the cross hair to the to the area of action then small gentle movements with the gyro to fine tune my aiming. It’s sounds like a compromise here, but honestly after a few goes I really settled into enjoying the game without the frustration of battling with the controls and although it might not be instantly intuitive I really think this is the best way to play by far.

I do have to note though, I don’t think many people are aware that the Switch is compatible with any standard USB mouse should the developer choose to support it. I’m sure not many people play their Switch at a desk with the space to use a mouse and I’ve no idea how difficult this would have been to implement but this would seem to be the perfect game to make use of this feature. I wonder if this could be added in an update without a huge investment of time?

So the arcade experience is here fully in tact. Again, this is a remake so it’s not going to be 1:1 identically faithful to the original but I couldn’t notice anything to be upset about. There are 4 different difficult settings, easy, medium, hard and arcade, the option of a more modern scoring system with multipliers, and the inclusion of an all new hoard mode which claims to throw up to 15 times the enemies as the original version.

This remake does also offer a variety of optional quality of life improvements such as varying degrees of aim assist, auto reload, the ability to use your high score to buy more continues, starting the game from any chapter you have completed.

The technical performance of the game isn’t really great unfortunately. Even with the option to trade graphic fidelity for increased performance, the game frequently stutters and drops frames. I’m not particularly sensitive to these things in general, but it was something that I did clearly notice at times. It’s didn’t distract so much as to take away my enjoyment of the game, but it did make be lust to play a version that would be a buttery smooth 60fps.

Over all I think the developer did an amazing job with this remake. The only negatives I can poke at are limitations of the Switches hardware it’s self such as the flakey gyro, the annoying rumble, and sub par performance, but in every instance it seems the developer was aware of these issues and offered as many options as possible to work around any personal annoyances.

You’re never going to be able to faithfully replicate the oldskool arcade light gun experience at home now without a relatively complexed custom set up like the Sinden light gun and a PC. But if this is as close as we can get with the hardware and set up we already have with no extra peripherals, then thats close enough for me!